The term realism implies plural meanings

The term realism implies plural meanings

and has been applied equally to different authors at different times in history. Towards which concept of realism does Idoia Montón navigate? Her stance, not a priori but subsequently enlightened by analysts of her work, would have a certain closeness to that of Gustave Courbet, despite the century and a half that separates them. Oriol Font also perceived this at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya while contemplating an exhibition of the painter from Ornans and providing him with the impulse to make self-portraits, landscapes, the death, the house and two old cities (2013), a videographic binding of images offered by both creators of their vital and emotional environment. Both far from formal realism, they have in common the social and the individual, the universal and the particular, incorporating the day-to-day affairs into painting, without glamorizing, idealizing or poeticising it, ridding it of conventions through the veracity that arises from direct non-judgemental observation, as well as adding ethical premises.

The constructions of the Basque artist offer successive fragments of the tangible and prosaic reality of those industrial places around Bilbao and the people that inhabit them and who exert a special power over her in pictorial terms. She knows that the strength painting resides in the painting itself rather than in its theme. Hence, she applies herself to caring for the structure of the painting, to ensuring that the technology is at the service of the objective she sets and to being consistent in the exercise of freedom in spite of the bridges that she crosses periodically and which can give the feeling of extreme heterogeneity.